Word: verbale
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...When he's not using funding as a carrot, Wen, 34, isn't afraid to reach for a verbal stick. He recently told the Los Angeles Times that the Chinese government's goal of achieving about 230 pollution-free days a year in Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics was merely propaganda intended to lull the public into thinking the air is getting cleaner. Equally blunt, he says China's plans to build scores of nuclear reactors without local consultation are "irrational and undemocratic...
...Connor: For the immediate future, I've been very concerned about the number of verbal attacks on judges - and a few physical attacks as well from time to time. I have felt that the public concern has followed the concerns expressed by various legislators both in Congress and state legislatures, concerns about so-called activist judges. I suspect when people hear legislators so often publicly denounce activist, godless judges that people start thinking that's the situation. It's very much a concern...
...evocations of popular songs. Idle's been writing this sort of ditty for decades. At Cambridge he did a song called "I Like Chinese" ("They only come up to your knees") that he reprised at the Hollywood Bowl. In his Flying Circus days he'd start with the verbal legerdemain of a highbrow-sounding verse ("Can a bee be said to be / Or not to be an entire bee / When half the bee is not a bee / Due to some ancient injury") with a simple chorus ("La di dah, one two three / Eric the half...
...Well, now he's had one for the 40-plus years of his Python fame. Idle remains the most boyish of the group, with a sense of humor unabashedly adolescent, both pleasing and easy to please. His love of verbal play is so intense it seems like a bright boy's first passion at discovering the worlds in words - the alternate, funhouse universes that language could create. Sometimes that ardor lasts a lifetime; it did for Joyce and Nabokov. Not that Idle is at their rarefied level, but his word-joy was from the beginning, and remains, infectious...
...into skirmishes between the C's (Cambridge alums Cleese, Chapman and Idle) and the O's (Oxonians Jones and Palin and Occidental College graduate Gilliam). It wasn't so much a clash of school ties as a debate of which was the more important element in their comedy: the verbal or the visual. It was also, Gilliam would have you believe, a tussle between the queen bees in the first group and the worker bees in the second...